@Indrajala: What Indians are you interacting with? Probably the whittie/European wannabes mostly? I met this Indian master of nada yoga once and he said in India there are about 100 million, maybe even 200 million who try to live a spiritual life and reject materialism and the Western lifestyle and they try to live according to Hindu/Vedic dharma. But overall the European wannabes dominate the globe, the colonized have long stopped wanting to be themselves and want to be the colonizers, so I don't doubt you can meet many people of the consumer-destroyer duality in India once long lived civilization that looks like it will collapse any day now since they gave up their Vedic roots for the West's weed.

Like I mentioned, if you go back in time, even in the USA, the Americans of the early 20th Century and especially the 19th Century would be disgusted with the homo-consumens running around pretending they are human. They used to consider consumption a vice, not a virtue and thrift, self-sufficiency and mending or "recycling" was the old virtue.

Thrasymachus wrote:@Indrajala: What Indians are you interacting with? Probably the whittie/European wannabes mostly?

Here in Delhi it is mostly English speakers I can communicate with, though Ladakhis tend to know English. I've talked to them about the changes in Ladakh and some are worried. There's crime when there was none before. There's talk of brothels being opened in Leh. Young people have a lot more desires and expectations. One nun mentioned people "being brainwashed by money".

A lot of the educated folks in India display a desire to be on par with Europe. They might have a nice house built by the cheapest Bihari labour, but don't care much about all the filth and rubbish piled up outside their homes. Gated communities are becoming common in Delhi and the suburbs. The gap between the rich and poor is getting larger. Inflation is eating into the food budgets of the working class.

India is such a mess. Politically it is crooked. Economically it grinds through somehow. Socially there is such a huge need for internal policing because of all the poverty and corruption. Yet they have no choice it seems but to move forward with more industry, infrastructure and consumption. The alternative is going back to the "dark ages" and for those who want to see themselves as equals to westerners this is unacceptable. These are the people who call the shots. Politics is decided by money now, which was different decades ago when it was more about political charisma (think Gandhi).

They used to consider consumption a vice, not a virtue and thrift, self-sufficiency and mending or "recycling" was the old virtue.

Growth of money culture is part of any civilization cycle in Eurasia it seems. At some point there is enough money in the system so that merchant classes start attempting to buy political power for themselves, in contrast to earlier periods when they were shut out and the aristocracy or some political class commanded authority easily because of a lack of money.

This happened in the Middle Ages in Europe for instance. In the early period money was scarce and most transactions were done with barter or some kind of reciprocal social arrangements (peasants working the land of their lord in exchange for protection and land). Political power was not at all determined by money, but by military and religious power. This continued until the later period when merchants became "king makers" and kingdoms had to borrow money from merchants to fight wars.

This is quite a logical development actually because the merchant class will trade in their increasing wealth for political power inevitably. They also start influencing the culture in such a way that money oriented culture develops. It happened throughout ancient India and China as well. However, carrying capacity is exceeded and eventually economies collapse along with whole societies resulting in a restart of the cycle. When things collapse money disappears (like in the Dark Ages or north China between the Han (3rd cent CE) and Sui (6th cent CE) dynasties, and other political arrangements which might logically value thrift emerge.

In any case, when our present system falls apart, and I'd say it is actually happening right now, money culture will simultaneously die.

We may need to modify the expected collision between our galaxy and Andromeda... Everyone lean left.

Is the issue of global climate change a real issue?

The author Frank Herbert - in his Dune series - made an interesting observation concerning our inability to make plans that are genuinely long term. And he was not talking about just a few generations either. I tend to think he had a very good point. There would have to be, in my opinion, a global paradigm shift in perception for any meaningful truly long term plan to get implemented. Of course one could argue that the teachings of the Buddha are such a plan, but 2500 years later the world grinds on largely oblivious to it.

Out of the several extremely thin chances ahead of us I suspect that diaspora is going to be the most likely to have a chance of success.

Indrajala wrote:Here in Delhi it is mostly English speakers I can communicate with, though Ladakhis tend to know English. I've talked to them about the changes in Ladakh and some are worried. There's crime when there was none before. There's talk of brothels being opened in Leh. Young people have a lot more desires and expectations. One nun mentioned people "being brainwashed by money".

In the mid-,late-90's a documentary came out on social changes in Ladakh, focusing on Leh. Their assertion was that the Western consumer culture being introduced there and in the rest of the world was in reality a brand of "adolescent boy culture" (their exact words). I'm pretty sure that they continued to link consumption with instant gratification, impulse activity and by extension to masturbation with the later probably not explicitly mentioned (after all, they wanted this documentary to air in the US where such explicit mention could be problematic). Naturally these changes were not restricted to Ladakh or Asia.

"Even if you practice only for an hour a day with faith and inspiration, good qualities will steadily increase. Regular practice makes it easy to transform your mind. From seeing only relative truth, you will eventually reach a profound certainty in the meaning of absolute truth."Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.

kirtu wrote:In the mid-,late-90's a documentary came out on social changes in Ladakh, focusing on Leh.

I was speaking to some Ladakhi students today asking them why they don't wear traditional Ladakhi clothing.

"It is only for special occasions now."

I chuckled because when I was in Ladakh I bought traditional garments and wore them around town. The locals grinned and were pleased.

Regardless of what elders might think, youth have satellite television now. They also get DVDs. They furthermore go to the big cities to get an education. A lot of consumer values present in just urban Indian society, which are a lot, become part of their thinking. They suddenly had access to modern healthcare, roads, consumer goods and so forth. It all happened in a generation basically. They didn't have any electricity until the early 90s I was told. Now Ladakhis are generally well off by Indian standards. Some are doing very very well.

Thrasymachus wrote:I meant to write this earlier, but I thought the above exchange was some of the greatest comedy on this forum. The optimist of ignorance, Kim O'Hara, "how dare you not believe that the scientists and engineers cannot solve climate change," and the denier par excellence, alex123, "there is no human induced climate change, it is a hoax, the paid representatives of the industries responsible told me so!"

I am not getting paid, and I am not in principle against AGW theory. It is just that I need more proof.

Lets say that humans never produced carbon emitting factories,how much less extreme weather events would we have? Can we say: without humans we would have so much, with humans emitting CO2 we would have that much.

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

Cleaning up our air in the West may have made us healthier, but it could also be behind the rise in north Atlantic tropical storms since the mid-1990s. A new analysis shows that the number of these storms falls when pollution rises, and increases when pollution drops...

But aerosols also increase the brightness and lifetime of low-level marine clouds. When Dunstone added this effect into his climate models, the simulated clouds cooled the surface more than expected. Historically, this cooling effect has been strongest in the north Atlantic, close to aerosol sources in the US and Europe.

Cooling the north Atlantic reduces the energy available to power hurricanes. It also shifts rising and falling air currents further south, increasing wind shear in the Atlantic hurricane nursery. This extra wind shear tears nascent storms apart before they can gain strength....Throughout the 20th century, aerosol emissions increased with industrialisation and decreased in economic slumps. Tropical storms were frequent from the 1930s through to the 1950s, but rarer in the better economic times of the 1960s to mid-1990s. Then pollution controls reduced aerosol levels, and Atlantic hurricanes came roaring back, with 19 in 1995, a record 28 in 2005, and 19 in each of the past three years....Other research supports the link between aerosols and storm frequency, says Gabriel Vecchi of the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey.http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... cgySNK1FSj

If we take all factors into consideration: the Sun and its cycles, the position of the Earth, other astronomical events, the gradual cooling of Earth (over billions of years), humans releasing (not producing any more than naturally occurring Carbon) CO2, and other things that can cool Earth, ->our fault, if any, is too small to be a cause.

Of course we should treat environment well and find better energy sources. I am all for clean environment.

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

Thrasymachus wrote:I meant to write this earlier, but I thought the above exchange was some of the greatest comedy on this forum. The optimist of ignorance, Kim O'Hara, "how dare you not believe that the scientists and engineers cannot solve climate change," and the denier par excellence, alex123, "there is no human induced climate change, it is a hoax, the paid representatives of the industries responsible told me so!"

Hi, Thrasymachus,I've been away for a while and I'm still in catch-up mode. That said, I'm glad to have entertained you. However, I think you've nailed Alex pretty accurately but have misunderstood my position slightly. I'm not ignorant and I'm not, really, very optimistic - I'm a glass-half-full realist. I have been saying all along that we are in diabolical trouble but if we stop trying to do anything about it, we will be in even worse trouble than we are already and in far worse trouble than if we do our best to minimise the trouble we're in. I mean, if you were behind the wheel of a car that was speeding towards a brick wall, wouldn't you put your foot on the brake so that the crash would only injure you instead of kill you? If you were in the passenger seat (which is closer to our situation on climate change), wouldn't you yell at the driver to put the brakes on? Or grab the handbrake and yank on it as hard as possible?

If we just say, as the thread title does, that we're doomed, then we are allowing the driver to keep on accelerating towards that brick wall. Not smart.

I recently read a newspaper article on Bhutan. Their government is aiming at making all. Farming organic & measuring success in the happiness & healthiness of it's citizens. A big change from most countries that measure success purely in economical terms. Unfortunately it's probably not realistic for other countries to follow Bhutan as an example as I believe it only has a population of 400,000.

Kim O'Hara wrote:I have been saying all along that we are in diabolical trouble but if we stop trying to do anything about it, we will be in even worse trouble than we are already and in far worse trouble than if we do our best to minimise the trouble we're in.

How do you know that we can do anything significant about it? Minimize the activity of the sun? Move Earth further away from the sun? Alter the total amount of Carbon on Earth? Produce more CO2 to cool the Earth? But we release very little of it, and none of it is new carbon or oxygen...

Climate changes. Just like we can't change anicca into nicca, same is here.

As for "we are doomed". Yes, everything that is born is doomed to die. This is not that bad considering that life contains imperfections.

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

shaunc wrote:I recently read a newspaper article on Bhutan. Their government is aiming at making all. Farming organic & measuring success in the happiness & healthiness of it's citizens. A big change from most countries that measure success purely in economical terms. Unfortunately it's probably not realistic for other countries to follow Bhutan as an example as I believe it only has a population of 400,000.

Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_national_happiness for an overview of the idea. The discussion near the end nearly touches on, but doesn't actually mention, Western efforts to measure wellbeing and turn our society away from its chronic Affluenza - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluenza. I think it's a paradigm shift whose time has come. We have moved past the stage at which we needed all the food and all the possessions we could accumulate, merely to ensure we would survive, and have moved into a stage at which the drive for more of everything has become a threat to our survival. And we are smart enough - or at least some of us are - to see what's happening and change course.Oops! I'm gonna be called an ignorant optimist again for that, aren't I? Okay then, make it ... "begin, ever so slowly, to change course." But I would rather encourage those beginnings, however slow they may be, than encourage BAU.

No the problem is the opposite, I understand your position better than you understand your position, that is your problem.

Kim O'Hara wrote:I mean, if you were behind the wheel of a car that was speeding towards a brick wall, wouldn't you put your foot on the brake so that the crash would only injure you instead of kill you? If you were in the passenger seat (which is closer to our situation on climate change), wouldn't you yell at the driver to put the brakes on? Or grab the handbrake and yank on it as hard as possible?

Climate change is nothing like putting the brakes on a car you are behind the wheel yourself or telling a driver while you are in the passenger seat to stop. Billions of people will have to change their whole worldview, habits and orientation in the world and toward the world, and it is easier to kill off a billion people(which extreme climate change will do) than to change their minds, sadly. Your example is too telling, in the past in this thread I told you have a laughably mistaken sense of agency.

At my work under our union contract we are offered free spring water in 16 oz. bottles. I am the only worker I have met(out of two yards with over 40 workers) that brings a re-usable steel water bottle and fills up with tap water. It is a simple easy gesture but people don't give a shit, everywhere I look I see people who fill entitled to use as much resources as possible between now and when they die. Most my co-workers don't understand they are likely buying:1) tap water just wastefully repackaged and marketed as "spring water"2) actual spring water which is perhaps worse because these companies often locate at a water source, and use their "water rights" to deplete that source dry and pack up shop to the next water source. Why? Because most people just care about themselves, their directly immediate family, one or two friends and they look at life as:1) Collaborate with an earth destroying corporation in exchange for a salary expressed in money, and hopefully as high as possible(usually the higher the more essential to the system, thus the more sinister). Thus the average homo-consumens monster cannot understand that life comes from the dirt, the worms, the micro-organisms, the trees, the bees, the mammals, the fish. They think life comes from killing and com-modifying all of the above.

The average Westerner doesn't have to do anything and a portion of the surplus from the liquidation of eco-systems and the immiseration of the Third World will be distributed to him, so he can live in the type of opulence reserved for kings(while paradoxically things actually essentially for life like rent or a home mortgage are comparatively more expensive, but that is good so the wage slaves are forced to sell their labor). As long as people don't have to pick up the butchers knife to slit's a cow's throat, they will eat the cow they don't have the guts to slaughter themselves. As long as the CIA plots coups in oil rich countries like Venezuela and occupies others like Iraq, to control the oil markets the oil supply for US consumption(USA actually gets most foreign oil from Canada and Venezuela but if Iraq and other countries nationalized their oil production to get higher prices, prices would push up everywhere) can be uniform and cheap for Americans to almost reach the level where every person who has the money in a family over 16-17 in each household has at least one car to themselves. As long as local zoning forces people to maintain lawns millions of people will do it, wasting precious water and other resources. In supermarkets in the West almost half the food ends up in dumpsters, just because the system is about making money and not feeding people

What I am getting at is the total structure of society and the mentality of the people in society would have had to have changed sometime around when I was born and that didn't happen and it won't happen. What every person does is externalize the self, they seek to possess as much of the world as they can. The more of the earth's life sustaining resources they can consume, and the more wasteful ways they can do it, the more proud of themselves they will tend to be, with very few exceptions. You won't get woman if you ride a bicycle. You won't make many friends by dumpster diving instead of drinking beer at a bar, clubbing or boating. If you use a humanure toilet(basically shitting into a bucket and then covering it with organic matter like dried grass, sawdust) your guests will be disgusted. But if you use a resource wasting toilet connected to a sewer, they will be relieved. But people want to believe in easy solutions like the Prius, solar panels and yet more technology, when technology is exactly the problem that has allowed so much labor specialization and alienation from natural processes which has lead to a total war of man against everything else, which man is winning so splendidly and handily, the only thing left for him to destroy in the future will be himself. Look online, alot of people are jizzing themselves over these genetically modified mosquitos! Rather than just coping with getting stung as humanity has for millions of years and still survived, they would rather play genetic roulette. But those who gamble tend to lose, unfortunately in this case, we are taking those beings who didn't gamble, all the non-humans down first.

What I am getting at is the total structure of society and the mentality of the people in society would have had to have changed sometime around when I was born and that didn't happen and it won't happen.

I imagine it was around the same time that India and China started rapidly industrializing, too.

A lot of 3rd world countries basically adopted the same models used in the industrialized world, which are wasteful and produce a lot of smoke and garbage out of natural resources. The younger generations in places like China have little interest in forests, mountains and wildlife. In India educated youth often just talk about development and business. They study relevant subjects in school so they too can get a piece of the industrial pie regardless of the effect it ultimately has on the environment.

As I've said before, what the 1st world does at this point is irrelevant. China, India, Indonesia and so forth won't emulate greenies in the west as it would undermine their political and economic aspirations. The west has already lost a lot of charisma already.

It actually would have been better to keep China and India poor and rural rather than letting them industrialize and elevate some of their populations into the middle class.

I'm glad to live in a fairly clean city. Many people have new 'four wheel drives' parked in front of houses even though few have ever gone out to the bush or forest in years. Some have solar on the roof but the government has meanwhile scraped the incentives so fewer systems will be installed, anyway its too little too late.I have no garden but live under a canopy of huge trees so my roof guttering is constantly clogged with leaves, it's a small price to pay for greenery and birdsong. Meanwhile the neighbour has a few branches of one of my trees overhanging his drive, consequently there were bird droppings on his car....out came the chainsaw! He's calmed down now and once again lives in tidy town.In my neck of the woods there is no manufacturing left, trade schools have been closed so youths have no option but to go to Uni but not everyone is cutout for tertiary study and anyway where are the jobs? Most jobs have been outsourced to the third world, where large companies can hire and fire with ease and pay people a pittance!

There will be huge issues with clean drinking water in the near future as many countries near the source of great rivers are now diverting or damming the stream of water from people further down stream. Of course those affected become militant about the issue!Governments and corporations have meddled, globalised, redistributed and now what are the consequences?

China and India should have been left mainly rural as this rapid growth of industry will be the climatic and catastrophic downfall of the world as we know it.

No the problem is the opposite, I understand your position better than you understand your position, that is your problem.

I must bow to your profound wisdom, then, and ask you to explain to me what it is that I think? When all you know of me is a few hundred words on a computer screen?? Nope.

Thrasymachus wrote:In the past in this thread I told you have a laughably mistaken sense of agency.

You did. You were wrong, and I explained why and how you were wrong. You either didn't take it in or have forgotten. Sigh.

I'm not going to trawl back through (wow!) twenty pages of discussion to find what I wrote last time and direct you to it. Instead, I will make the fundamental point that whatever we do - or don't do - changes the world around us, and changes us. This is pure dharma - dependent origination - and pure science - cause and effect - and arguing against it will change the world in a very specific way: it will cost you (some of) the respect of everyone here who is willing to think and learn. Given that whatever we do - or don't do - changes the world around us, then, we have moral choices: to try to make the world (slightly) better or let it become (slightly) worse through our laziness, defeatism, lack of courage or whatever. That is agency. I have it, you have it, we all have it. I am willing to admit that I can't make as big a difference as I would like but I am not ever going to say that I make no difference at all - because I know it wouldn't be true. I'm a teacher. I change people all the time. I make them happier people, often kinder people, usually more knowledgeable people ... and they go on and change the world in better ways because of it. You can do the same. I hope you decide to do so.

During ordovician period there was an ICE AGE. The CO2 levels averaged as high as 4200 ppmToday the CO2 levels are 393.31 ppm...

What prevents ice age from occuring when we have 393ppm vs time when CO2 was 10 times higher than today and still had an ice age?

Why can't those astronomical events of the past that apparently caused ice age from repeating today or at least holding back "catastrophical" warming? IF CO2 is that bad, then why did those past levels didn't warm the planet so much that we would never be here? Levels were as high as 7,000ppm in the past 600 million years.

Also, a recent study from NASA suggests that... CO2 cools, yes, cools, the atmosphere. If this is true, then the whole man made global warming due to CO2 emissions is obsolete idea. Maybe our CO2 emissions are helping to reduce the rise in temperatures?!

Temperature goes naturally up, and some claim "Global warming!"When temperature falls, they change it to "climate change", thus whatever the weather does it is all blamed on humans which is convinient way to introduce new taxes...

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"

Great! On past experience, I think you may have to abandon some old things to fit some of the new things in. Remember the Zen story about the tea cup? But let's see how we go.

Alex123 wrote:During ordovician period there was an ICE AGE. The CO2 levels averaged as high as 4200 ppmToday the CO2 levels are 393.31 ppm...

What prevents ice age from occuring when we have 393ppm vs time when CO2 was 10 times higher than today and still had an ice age? Why can't those astronomical events of the past that apparently caused ice age from repeating today or at least holding back "catastrophical" warming? IF CO2 is that bad, then why did those past levels didn't warm the planet so much that we would never be here? Levels were as high as 7,000ppm in the past 600 million years.

Please go back to that page, especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordovician#Climate_and_sea_level, and re-read it carefully. The"ice age" you're talking about was right at the end of the Ordovician, and for most of the period temperatures and sea level were high along with the CO2. More generally, geological ages are a very poor guide to time scales which affect human society, as I've said to you before. A recent climate study has charted global temperature change over the last 12 000 years - i.e. the whole span of human civilisation. It looks like this:

Alex123 wrote:Also, a recent study from NASA suggests that... CO2 cools, yes, cools, the atmosphere. If this is true, then the whole man made global warming due to CO2 emissions is obsolete idea. Maybe our CO2 emissions are helping to reduce the rise in temperatures?!

No. You are missing the significance of a key word: “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.” And they do mean extreme upper atmosphere, which has very different effects from the lower atmosphere.

Alex123 wrote:Temperature goes naturally up, and some claim "Global warming!"When temperature falls, they change it to "climate change", thus whatever the weather does it is all blamed on humans which is convinient way to introduce new taxes...

Temperature hasn't gone up naturally. See above.Temperature hasn't fallen. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998.htm"Climate change" is broader than "Global warming" but includes global warming and nearly all the change in the last hundred years has been warming, not cooling. However, there are occasional regional deviations from the trend. But call it what you like, so long as you recognise its reality.

Alex123 wrote:Also, a recent study from NASA suggests that... CO2 cools, yes, cools, the atmosphere. If this is true, then the whole man made global warming due to CO2 emissions is obsolete idea. Maybe our CO2 emissions are helping to reduce the rise in temperatures?!

No. You are missing the significance of a key word: “When the upper atmosphere (or ‘thermosphere’) heats up, these molecules try as hard as they can to shed that heat back into space.” And they do mean extreme upper atmosphere, which has very different effects from the lower atmosphere.

How do we know that our release of CO2 doesn't go to the upper atmosphere thus contributing (however small) to cooling the Earth rather than heating it?

What if the >95% of CO2 which is naturally emitted (totally without human contribution) goes more to the upper part of the atmosphere than our <5% contribution to the lower part of the atmosphere? Then all our supposed warming of the Earth is cancelled out.

Considering how much temperature can fluctuate WITHOUT any humans alive, how can we be certain that current fluctuations are not determined by non antropogenic factors? Even if, even if, for the sake of discussion we assume that ALL our emissions go only to the lower part of the atmosphere, even then the natural CO2 cycle would cancel out all our heating (and even perhaps cause cooling) due to the behaviour of CO2 in extreme upper atmosphere. After all, how did CO2 get there?

”Even the water melting from the snow-capped peaks can find its way to the ocean"